Tag: dzone

Javachannel's Interesting Links podcast, episode 8

Welcome to the eighth ##java podcast. I’m Joseph Ottinger, dreamreal on the IRC channel, and it’s Thursday, 2017 December 20. Andrew Lombardi from Mystic Coders is with me again.
Please don’t forget: this is your podcast, with your content too. You can contribute by using a carrier pigeon and sending us notes encoded with rot13 – twice if you want to be really secure – or by using javabot on the IRC channel, with ~submit and an http link, or you can also write content for the channel blog at javachannel.org, or you can even just tell us that something’s interesting… we’ll pick it up from there.

  1. “Non-Blocking vs. blocking I/O: Go with blocking.” is an article by ##java’s surial. In it, he’s talking about asynchronous code, especially with respect to I/O… and his assertion is that you really don’t want to do it. If you decide you do (and there are reasons to) then you should at least rely on some of the libraries that already exist to make it easier… but he mostly points out that it isn’t worth it for most programmers. Interesting read, especially when you consider that Python and Node.JS live and die on this programming model.

  2. “To self-doubting developers: are you good enough?” is an article meant to make you mediocre programmers feel better about yourselves. It talks about the processes and exercises that we all more or less had to go through to achieve competence. It’s not a long post, but it has some good points; programming is practice and art, just like athletics, really – and sometimes you lose, sometimes you plateau, sometimes you have to put in time that someone else might not have to put in. Sometimes the other guy is a natural at some things, and your effort is required to give you the edge… but the good news is that you can put in the effort.

  3. Jason Whaley posted a link called “Incident review: API and Dashboard outage on 10 October 2017” that went into a Postgres multinode deployment failure. It’s a payments company, so the outage is a pretty big deal for them; the short form is that they had a series of failures at the wrong time, and the postgres installation failed. That’s something we don’t hear about very often – either because people are ashamed of it, or hiding it, or some other more nefarious reason, perhaps. More reasons why I’m a developer and not in DevOps? Some pretty in-depth analysis on multi-master Postgres and unintended consequences of architecture. Appears that aside from the Postgres-specific things mentioned here, it probably is a good idea to regularly introduce fault into your infrastructure to test it, to see where the problems are you didn’t intend. And the automation erodes knowledge.

  4. “Want to Become the Best at What You Do? Read this.” goes over five steps to being all that you can be including quoting “Eye of the Tiger” for added insult. Several of the ideas in here are valid though, focusing on improving your skills / self-improvement and putting yourself out there in a vulnerable way. All the items have a “The Secret” type of vibe around them though, which is a bit of a turn off. Love the process, better yourself, make a positive impact on the world, sounds pretty good.

  5. A user on ##java posted a reference to zerocell – a simple open source library to read Excel spreadsheets into Java POJOs. Apache POI is the go-to for this, but POI is a little long in the tooth; it’s always nice to see people creating new solutions. I don’t have any Excel spreadsheets that I need converted into POJOs handy – and I don’t think I’ve EVER had them… except maybe once.

  6. “Understanding and Overcoming Coder’s Block” is YET ANOTHER lifestyle article for this podcast; it’s addressing those times when someone who might otherwise be a good coder – or writer, or anything – encounters the inability to write anything worthwhile. It’s focused on code, but it’s pretty general even so: reasons include a lack of clarity on what you’re trying to achieve, or a lack of decisiveness about how to solve a problem, or maybe the problem just seems too big to solve, or maybe even that you’re just not all that jazzed about the project you’re working on. It also addresses external factors – you know, real life – that might be getting in the way. Lastly, it includes some tips for each of those problems to perhaps point the way forward.

  7. “The Myth of the Interchangeable Developer” is yet another lifestyle article that points out what we all know but that recruiters and managers seem to be ignorant about: we all have specific skillsets. If I’m a good services developer, it doesn’t necessarily follow that I’m a good UI developer, for example… it doesn’t mean that I can’t learn, but it certainly implies that there’s an extra cost in time or aptitude for me to actually design a UI.

  8. “Understanding Monads: a guide for the perplexed” is an article trying to explain monads yet again. Maybe it’s me, but I’m thinking that monads might be one of those formal terms that’s useful but not useful enough, because they’ve been around forever but people still don’t get them. Maybe there’s a giant set of programmers who shouldn’t be allowed to program… but my feeling is that ‘monad’ is mostly jargon. To me it’s a stateless bit of code that defers state elsewhere, so it’s “functionally pure.” Lots of languages that rely on asynchronous programming have a similar concept, but they don’t necessarily call them “monads” (and they can store state elsewhere, too, so maybe they’re cheating.) It’s a decent article, but if you don’t understand monads, it may not .. actually change anything for you. But maybe it will.

  9. Ah, Project Valhalla. DZone has an article – pretty old now, actually, a month or two – that talks about Valhalla. No Valkyries, unfortunately, but value types instead: object references that are referred to just like primitives. This means that Java might get some forms of reification… but it’s hard to say. The main thing I wanted to see from the article was more clear example code; there’s one that boxes an integer in a generic class, without specifying the integer type, but I’m not actually seeing where there’s a real benefit in code yet.

  10. One of my favorite subjects is up next: “Why Senior Devs Write Dumb Code and How to Spot a Junior From A Mile Away.” Want to find a junior developer? Find someone who spends four hours tuning a bit of code that will run … once every four hours. Overexerting yourself trying to write the perfect bit of code every time… that’s a junior developer. Of course, we all know some senior developers who do the same sort of thing… and we tolerate them, but it’s just tolerance. I don’t write supercomplicated code if I can help it, and I’d rather provide simple code to get something simple done if I can, even if that means I’m wasting a few hundred K of RAM or a few dozen milliseconds. I mean, sure, if we need those milliseconds or that RAM, we can tune for that… but we do that when necessary and not otherwise. A summary might be: hesitate to wax locquacious when your innate desire is to extrude tendrils for others to admire your skill; alternatively, allow their senses to inhale your greatness despite their inability to immediately perceive how impressive your capabilities are, especially in comparison to their own.

Interesting Links, 17 Mar 2016

This list was originally supposed to be published over a week ago, but life’s been busy. Sorry, folks! Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

  • A succesful Git branching model considered harmful is a response to another article, A successful Git branching model. Both models can work; which one works better for you depends on a lot of factors that are likely to be unique to your development environment. (I’ve used both: I find the “cactus model” better, personally.)
  • The Four Software Engineering Personality Types describes four personalities (surprise) in development environment: Iron Man, Michaelangelo (the sculptor, not the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle), Yoda, and Captain America.
    • Iron Man is a tinkerer – get 90% of the project done, really quickly.
    • Michaelangelo is the detail-oriented, deep-diving programmer – the one who spends years on a given project, working out every detail. Michaelangelos’ projects tend to be unusable until they’re done – then they’re mission-critical and awesome.
    • Yoda is a teacher (or, if you like, a puppet with a hand up his… I mean, “a teacher.”) These are the guys who know tons of stuff, and show it to others, growing an organization and providing wisdom – and a great lever when they focus on doing specific tasks.
    • Captain America is the workhorse, the one who’ll roll up his sleeves and do the unpleasant work. Like in the comics, Captain America and Iron Man go well together; Iron Man rockets through the stratosphere, flashy and quick, and Captain America cleans everything up and makes it work well.
  • The Deep Roots of Javascript Fatigue goes into the rather chaotic waters of JavaScript development. Java’s in a great place: it’s dynamic enough that the community finds new and interesting ways to develop software all the time, but it’s also stable enough that you’re not having to relearn how to do everything every year, which is the situation you find in JavaScript. Excellent writeup, even if JavaScript development isn’t quite as dire as it might sound on the surface.
  • And now into our selection of excellent DZone content: Abstraction Considered Harmful..? has a bit to say about abstractions: they’re good, but sometimes they’re leaky (and therefore can be bad). But mostly they’re useful. From the article: “Abstraction, in and of itself, is not harmful. On the contrary, it’s necessary for progress. What’s harmful is relying on impenetrable barriers to protect our precious programmers from hard problems. After all, the 21st-century engineer understands that in order to play in the sand, we all need to be comfortable getting our feet a little wet from time to time.”
  • In Anatomy of a Good Java Test, Sam Atkinson (who will show up again in this same collection of interesting links) walks through a simple recipe for good testing. It looks like it’s based around JUnit4 and Hamcrest – hardly awful choices, but also not necessarily the state of the art (or the only way to write good tests). Good baseline, though.
  • In In Defense of the Fifth Year Developer, Matthew Casperson argues for some of the abstraction discussed earlier – the point’s not very clear, but complex code laden with abstractions is easier to test and verify, because it breaks problems down into identifiable units.
  • And back to Sam Atkinson: In Constructor vs. Getter: A Better Way he discusses the use of no-operation classes to wrap optional behavior (thus: NoOpNotifier, with methods that do nothing, instead of a null that has to be checked). This simplifies the code path (a good thing), and also helps with that pesky abstraction thing. Good article.

Interesting Links, 9 Feb 2016

  • From Parks Computing, a short word of advice in “On Recruiting” for the movers and shakers (and those who want to be movers and shakers): “The quality of your company’s software will never exceed the quality of your company’s software developers.”
  • DZone is back with a few interesting posts: “OpenJDK – Is Now the Time?” starts by wondering is OpenJDK is reaching critical mass to the point where it should be considered instead of the standard Oracle JDK. It’s an odd post.
    • It points out that if Google had used OpenJDK instead of Oracle’s libraries, the lawsuit might not have happened (Editor’s note: it might have!). This is a good point.
    • It says that the deployment options might open up, with standard package management instead of a custom update process specific to Java. This is also a good point.
    • It points out that OpenJDK’s performance and scalability is the same as the Oracle JDK. This is… not a good point. The codebases are the same (they’re routinely synchronized: code in one will be in the other eventually.) Oracle’s JDK is effectively OpenJDK with some closed-source libraries, so Oracle’s JVM can write JPEGs natively (and some other features like that.)
    • It also points out community improvements to OpenJDK – “As open source developer’s continue to provide insight into the source code, it is likely that OpenJDK could begin to outperform the version released by Oracle.” Um… since the codebases are the same, that’s not likely to happen much at all.
  • From ##java, cheeser had a beautiful expression of reference equivalence. Someone was asking about how two references (A and B) pointing to the same object work – cheeser said, “If B is your *name*, A would be a nickname. Both of them mean you so anything said to either name or nickname both go to you.“
  • “Fix PATH environment variable for IntelliJ IDEA on Mac OS X” describes a way for OSX users to provide the OS’s PATH to the popular IDE. It turns out that programs installed via brew aren’t necessarily available to IDEA unless you start IDEA from the shell – which few do. It’s easy to fix; this post shows you how.
  • Another from DZone – they’re on fire! – Per-Ã…ke Minborg posted “Overview of Java’s Escape Analysis“, which discusses what escape analysis is (it’s a way of determining the visibility of an object) and what it means for performance. (If an object isn’t used outside of a method or a block, it can be allocated on the stack rather than on the JVM heap – and as fast as the heap can be in Java, the stack is much faster.)
  • Pippo is a new, very small microframework based on services. The example looks … easy enough; take a look, see what you think.
  • Yet one more from DZone: Exceptions in Java: You’re (Probably) Doing It Wrong advocates the use of RuntimeException to get rid of those pesky throws clauses and forced try/catch blocks in your Java code. It’s an argument Spring advocates, and checked exceptions aren’t part of languages like Scala… but I personally find the over-reliance on unchecked exceptions to be terrible. The core argument against check exceptions from the article: “The old argument is that (the use of checked exceptions) “forces” developers to handle exceptions properly. Anyone on a real code base knows that this does not happen, and Exceptions are routinely ignored, or printed out and then ignored. This isn’t some sign of a terrible developer; it is such a common occurrence that it is a sign that checked Exceptions are broken.” Except no, it’s such a common occurrence that it’s a sign that developers are terrible. This article was so terrible that I’ll probably write up a better response as soon as I get some time.

Interesting Links, 5 Feb 2016

  • “O Java EE 7 Application Servers, Where Art Thou?” is a humorously-titled summary of the state of Java EE 7 deployment options, covering the full and web profiles for Java EE 7. It’s the sort of thing one wants to know, honestly: great job, Antonio.
  • From Stack Overflow, “How to get started with Akka streams?” is a Scala question, not a Java one, but Akka has a Java implementation as well. The first answer (accepted, upvoted) is a fantastic explanation. I may port it to pure Java just for example’s sake…
  • From our friends at DZone, Orson Charts 1.5 is Open Source announces that Orson Charts 1.5 has been released, and it’s available under the GPLv3 (a commercial license is available for people who don’t want the restrictions of the GPL). It’s a 3D charting library, not a 2D charting library, and they say if you need 2D charts, you should use JFreeChart – Orson Charts looks great on first impressions, though. (It’s worth noting that apparently both Orson Charts and JFreeChart were from the same author.)
  • More from DZone: Application Security for Java Developers is a summary of security concerns. It’s really more of a short “have you thought of this?” post – useful, but not very deep.